STREET PLANNING IN U.S.

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22183, 28 August 1937, Page 13

STREET PLANNING IN U.S.

INFORMATION FOR USE IN CHRISTCHURCH IMPRESSIONS GAINED BY MR T. ANDREWS A keen interest in civic activities in the United States and in Canada was taken by Mr T. Andrews, a member of the Christchurch City Council, during a tour of four months and a half in these countries. Mr Andrews returned to Christchurch yesterday. Because he is chairman of the council's reserves committee, Mr Andrews was most interested in the parks and recreational spaces of the larger cities he visited, and he found much to admire. On this phase of municipal administration and others he gained information which he hopes will be useful in bringing about improvements in the city's amenities.

In spite of his admiration for the parks and gardens of cities in Canada and the United States. Mr Andrews believes that in some respects Christchurch more than holds its own. The Bronx Gardens in New York he considered were most impressive in their size but they were not comparable in neatness and in richness and variety of colouring with the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch. . The planning of footpaths in San Francisco, he said, was admirable, and the beauty of planning was enhanced by the absence of fences in front and at the sides of houses. The footpaths were 26ft wide, a 4ft strip on the road edge being used fpr planting trees, another strip of the same width being laid out as a path for pedestrians, and the remainder being lawn. Mr Andrews said he had never seen better planned streets tnan those of San Francisco, and the adoption of similar planning in Christchurch would unquestionably beautify the city. In its street. trees Seattle set an example also that could be followed by Christchurch with advantage, for tree-planting in the streets in the same fashion as that adopted in Seattle would, for one thing, never give cause for complaint that the street lighting was poor. Many kinds of trees wco planted in the Seattle streets, but they were well spaced and between them were planted flowering shrubs. Mr Andrews spent three months in the United States and gave some of his time to an investigation of the schemes for milk supply in the mam cities. He had not found any city in which the supply was municipally controlled, but he had obtained a good deal of information about various aspects of the industry that would be placed before the milk committee of the City Council. , „ ... , The traffic problem in the United States was one which could not escape notice. The present difficulty, said Mr Andrews, was to reorganise traffic control to handle the remarkable growth of road traffic. There were 28,500,000 motor-cars in the United States to-day, and it had been estimated that in two or three years this number would have grown to 32,000,000. The present huge volume of traffic was well controlled, and pedestrians and motorists co-operated willingly enough with the traffic officers. Automatic signals were fully used, and to aid motorists or pedestrians who might not be able to see the lights, bells rang when the lights operated. Control officers often used whistles in preference to other signals, and there was very little hand signalling. The great difficulty was to avoid congestion when there was such a huge volume of traffic, and patrol officers were of great value in keeping traffic moving smoothly.